A Brief History of OER in Texas
The state of Texas has become a leader in support of OER. Numerous colleges, universities, organizations, and the THECB have, for more than two decades, been implementing and/or supporting programs to lower the costs of learning resources for their students and take advantage of the other affordances that OER offer.
A watershed moment in the history of OER in the state (and beyond) was the founding of OpenStax by Richard Baraniuk in 1999 at Rice University in Houston. Originally named Connexions, OpenStax began as an OER repository, expanding in 2012 to publish a series of free, openly licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks. OpenStax now publishes texts in over seven disciplines for both the secondary and postsecondary levels and serves as a partner on several THECB initiatives, and a number of Texas colleges and universities participate in OpenStax’s Institutional Partner Program.
In 2011-12, seven Texas community colleges/districts received Trade Adjustment and Assistance Community College and Career Training grants from the U.S. Department of Labor to develop OER and OER-based curricula. Meanwhile, a 2014 report, “A Study on Open Educational Resources and Their Potential for Use at Texas Colleges,” published by the THECB, described this and other nascent work in open education in the state, making recommendations for further OER development and use at Texas’ colleges and universities. Two years later, eight community college campuses began participating in the federal Achieving the Dream Open Educational Resources Degree Initiative, developing OER to support full “Z-degrees” (for zero-textbook costs).
In 2017, open education efforts began to ramp up with the passage of the first legislation related to OER. Texas Senate Bill 810 codified OER in statute (Texas Education Code, Sections 51.451-51.453) through the following definition: “teaching, learning, or research resources that are in the public domain or that have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use, adaptation, and redistribution by any person. The term may include full course curricula, course materials, modules, textbooks, media, assessments, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques, whether digital or otherwise, used to support access to knowledge.”
This bill also had three major components: it created a statewide OER grant program; it established requirements for OER course designations/markings in course catalogs; and it ordered a statewide study to determine the feasibility of creating a Texas repository of open educational resources. To fulfill the latter component, in 2018, the THECB published “A Study on the Feasibility of a Texas Repository of Open Educational Resources.” The report recommended the development of a statewide OER repository, potentially leveraging an existing one like OER Commons.
The next sections will outline further research into OER practices and policies at Texas postsecondary institutions as well as expand on state legislation and its implications and impacts.